Multi-year agreement will use Owkin’s sophisticated AI to potentially enable Servier to develop novel therapeutics across various disease areas
PARIS, France and BOSTON, Mass., October 17th, 2023 – Servier, a global independent pharmaceutical group, and Owkin, a French American biotech focused on applying artificial intelligence (AI) to drug discovery, development, and diagnostics, today announced an innovative partnership to use AI to advance and accelerate better-targeted therapies across multiple disease areas, including oncology.
“I firmly believe that the convergence of scientific and medical breakthroughs, amplified by advanced technologies like AI, holds the key to swiftly introducing groundbreaking treatments that could usher in a new era of innovation for patient care. As an independent company, Servier can focus long-term. We look forward to partnering with Owkin to optimize our drug positioning and patient stratification to potentially bring the right treatment, to the right patient.”
Claude Bertrand, Executive Vice President of Research and Development and Chief Scientific Officer at Servier
“We are thrilled to partner with Servier whose primary focus is scientific development. This alliance is a further proof point of the pharmaceutical industry’s readiness to innovate and to advance precision medicine using AI. Our cutting-edge tools can help our partners deliver better R&D results and better outcomes for patients with cancer and other serious diseases.”
Thomas Clozel, co-founder, and CEO of Owkin
The two companies will initially tackle two major challenges within translational medicine and digital pathology. Owkin will apply state-of-the-art machine learning to Servier’s extensive clinical data in order to deliver novel insights into the underlying biology of disease, identifying the patient populations most likely to benefit from Servier’s new therapies to improve patient outcomes. A multidisciplinary team of scientists, computational medicine experts and clinicians from Servier and Owkin will collaborate closely to drive the collaboration between Paris and Boston.
The first project aims to identify tumor types, tumor microenvironments, as well as de-identified patient subgroups that may optimally respond to a Servier asset. The two companies will then analyze tumor evolution to potentially identify drug combinations that may act on additional immune checkpoints or tumor cell-intrinsic mechanisms. The second project will explore the implementation of digital pathology and its potential to speed upscreening and enable broader analysis of tissue-based biomarkers.